Coming soon: "Things We Do Not Talk About: Exploring Latino/a Literature through Essays and Interviews"

[If you'd like a PDF advance review copy, please write to me atolivasdan@aol.com and put "ARC" in the subject line.]

In
this candid and wide-ranging collection of personal essays and interviews, award-winning
author Daniel A. Olivas explores Latino/a literature at the dawn of the 21st
century.

While
his essays address a broad spectrum of topics from the Mexican-American
experience to the Holocaust, Olivas always returns to and wrestles with queries
that have no easy answers: How does his identity as a Chicano reflect itself through
his writing? What issues and subjects
are worth exploring? How do readers
react to the final results? Can
literature affect political discourse and our daily lives?

Olivas
has explored similar questions through almost a decade’s worth of interviews
with Latino/a authors that have appeared in various online literary
publications. While professors and
students alike have already relied upon many of the interviews as source
material for scholarly examination, twenty-eight of these incisive and frank dialogues
are now collected in one volume for the first time. Olivas dives deep to discover how these
authors create prose and poetry while juggling families, facing bigotry, struggling
with writer’s block, and deciphering a fickle publishing industry. This roster of interview subjects is a who’s
who of contemporary Latino/a literature:

Things We Do Not
Talk About
will undoubtedly become a natural companion to the study and enjoyment of
contemporary Latino/a literature. Cover artwork is by Perry Vasquez.

ᴥ

DANIEL
A. OLIVAS is the author of six books including the award-winning novel, The Book of Want (University of Arizona
Press). He is the editor of the landmark
anthology, Latinos in Lotusland
(Bilingual Press), which brings together sixty years of Los Angeles fiction by
Latino/a writers. Widely anthologized, Olivas's
fiction, poetry and essays have
appeared, or are forthcoming, in many literary journals including Exquisite
Corpse,PANK, The MacGuffin, PALABRA, New Madrid,
Fairy Tale Review, Bilingual
Review, and Pilgrimage. He has also
written for The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Jewish Journal, La Bloga,
El Paso Times, and the Los Angeles Review of Books. Olivas earned his degree in English
literature from Stanford University, and law degree from UCLA. By day, he is an attorney in the Public
Rights Division of the California Department of
Justice in Los Angeles.

This is great to see. I am now a latina single mom and I write write write but the reaction to my writing since joining the world of single motherhood has had he most profound effect in particular how much judgment there is towards single moms, not to mention being Latina and a single mom.